Wardill writes from Eatonia, Sask.
I have been a resident of rural Saskatchewan for almost 80 years. I am a flatlander. The only mountain I climb is a mountain of memories. Some are deeply etched.
In the summer of 1937, I watched a horse die. It was standing in front of the open door of a paint-blistered barn, swaying back and forth, unable to escape from a whirling mass of insects that circled its head.
It was dying of equine encephalitis. My eyes registered what I was seeing. It was real and immediate, but I was too unseasoned to place it within a larger context.
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That’s the way it is with the very young. A boy grows up by learning to link his experiences to other times and other places. My memories of any past event are conditioned now by what I learned later.
I was unaware that day of the significance of the diminished hay stack beside the barn or of the McCormick-Deering 15-30 parked by a fence that still held the broken skeletons of last year’s Russian thistles. It had left no cleat tracks for a long time.
Indulging in righteous indignation, I wondered why the farmer didn’t bring a gun and put the poor animal out of his misery. I didn’t understand. Now, I guess that he had no gun or couldn’t afford to buy shells. Or he had neither money nor skill to use in repairing the immovable tractor and was hoping the horse would miraculously recover.
He knew horses and oxen. He was a homesteader in 1910, only 27 years before, He must have had strong memories of the time when trails went impudently across the grassland without consideration for land titles or surveyed road allowances.
Part of his income then had come from leasing hay cutting rights on unsold properties held by land companies. The hay was baled in stationary presses and shipped by rail to distant places.
Only 30 years before 1910, there was no cultivated land in what is now the Rural Municipality of Chesterfield. There was only one rancher, Alan Poyntz Patrick, a Dominion Land Surveyor, who had a lease that straddled to the confluence of the South Saskatchewan and Red Deer Rivers.
A year later, Pierre and Gabriel Léveillé, Métis grandsons of Alexander Mackenzie, squatted on narrow, river-fronting farms below that confluence. Gabriel died there in 1883, the victim of a hunting accident.
During the next 30 years, early grazing leases were diminished to provide homesteads for settlers lured into the area by Ottawa and the railways. Much of the land opened for homesteading should never have been cultivated.
Boys of my age were isolated in small prairie towns, both by geography and by poverty. We learned something of the outside world in school. We also gained more knowledge, often dubious, from programs heard on battery-powered radios, from movies, books and magazines.
Access to any of these sources was limited by slim financial resources. Mostly, my friends and I learned by direct observation.
As often a possible, we met the trains and watched the unloading of all the goods the town needed – and an occasional passenger. Passenger service ended in 1954, as more people and products left the rails for an expanding highway system.
My friends and I explored the technology we could see. A World War One vintage Fordson tractor was imagined into a World War One fighter plane and a Holt combine became a battleship.
In 1934, we marvelled over the first Ford V8 we had ever seen. In 1935 and 1936, the sheet metal of the Ford cars was modernized and the dealer sold little, hard rubber replicas of the cars for 25 cents each. In 1937, the worst of all years, the dealer sold no cars, not even little rubber ones.
In 1937, we saw an Airflow Chrysler parked in front of the Eaton Supply Company property. The first store in the village, it was owned by Mike Asnin, a Jewish patriarch who beggared himself by grubstaking impoverished farmers. The owner of the streamlined car was a friend from Winnipeg.
The Airflow, too radical for its time, was a technological success and a sales failure. The line was discontinued in 1938.
In 1939, before the war began, we saw our first Massey-Harris Super 101 tractor – rubber tires, streamlined metal work painted bright red, a plate which labelled the motor as a Chrysler six-cylinder industrial motor. We were impressed.
Four years later, the farms were starved for workers. Schools released older pupils to help with the harvest. For three days, I drove a ponderous old Hart Parr, with a cross-mounted motor and slow-acting chains in its steering system.
Then it was replaced with an LA Case on rubber, a cosmetically improved version of the old Model L, painted a brilliant orange. The company called it Flambeau Red.
During that wartime harvest, I was paid $10 a day and thought I was on my way to becoming rich.
The post-war years were a heady time. The Veterans’ Land Act brought ex-servicemen back to the land. Things happened. There were new houses on the farms. There were 32 volt wind chargers and refrigerators that ran on kerosene. The power grid was extended to small towns.
The universal perfume worn by male farmers was the scent of 2-4,D. It was the beginning of the age of chemical farming. I thought there was no problem human beings couldn’t solve, nothing they couldn’t do, and prosperity would go on forever.
Fifty-two years after the war ended, I see mega-farms – acres and acres of rented land, much it farmed by Hutterite colonies that were not established in Saskatchewan until years after the war. I see field crops and don’t know what they are, see machines and don’t know what they do, hear words and don’t know what they mean.
I have come full circle and am again like the little boy who observed but could place none of his observations in a larger context.
There is no doubt that the bewildering display of technological advancement has produced benefits. Yet new technologies are never an unmixed blessing.
At the end of the next 80 years, will humans still be able to control all of the monsters science has let out of its boxes?
Or will humankind have developed unthreatening technologies that leave only a gentle imprint on the natural world?
